MaidSafe Dev Update 12th July 2016
Source: https://forum.safenetwork.io/t/maidsafe-dev-update-12th-july-2016/10246
Hi everyone, as you may know we have frozen the codebase in Crust, Routing and most of Vaults. This is in anticipation of moving the project forward in the very near future. It will be time to progress the Alpha releases when we are more satisfied with the current client APIs and client codebase. We are close to such a milestone, but do need another bit of testing to make sure we as a community are all happy to proceed. We have felt the pain of not just calling this sooner, but care and attention is paramount.This week we will be creating testnet 6 to allow everyone to download and feedback on the new Launcher that has received a lot of attention in the last few weeks. We have taken much of the feedback and revised the look and feel of the client-facing parts of the system. We are moving to test all the client updated code tomorrow in house and hope to release testnet 6 immediately after we are happy, as usual. This will be another test with all of the usual caveats. We do appreciate the huge effort and assistance the community has given us during the tests. It will be very comforting to switch gear again and move through a more formal process of iterative releases, with a full user experience being tested, from the download button through installers and using the code in a wider audience.The past week has seen much more in depth discussion in house regarding security, consensus and architecture going forward. We are certainly in a really nice position now with our simplified and cleaner codebase, but we obviously have a lot of effort left. There has been a lot of effort into restructuring Routing to again simplify the codebase there as well as quite a bit in safe_core to enable some features the client team required. Krishna, Scott and Shankar have really pushed the client codebase forward a lot. This was really important as the client had fallen behind while we were so focussed on the network components.In this same vein, the interviews should be proceeding now to build the team. The shortlist has been agreed and letters sent out. So the team leaders have more work on their hands, but this will pay off. The candidate quality is very high and that is excellent news.As ever, please enjoy testnet 6 later in the week. There won’t be many more testnets now
Crust, Core: Spandan (tl) & Vinicius
Most of the work in these libraries was refactoring and code enhancements (error recovery was one of them). The features added were mostly those that were demanded by client and front-end codes. The file creation API is now lower level, which means that Self-Encryption is more exposed to the Launcher. This should prevent the creation of zero byte files. Also added was the facility to get account information, which comprises of the number of PUTs done so far and the balance of PUTs remaining for the user.
Routing, Vaults: Adam, Andreas (tl), Fraser & Qi
While our cleanup, refactoring and test improvements are still ongoing, we are also back at the whiteboard to finalise our long-term plan that will get us from where we are (a proof-of-concept test network) to where we want to be (a stable, secure, persistent, upgradable network with an integrated cryptocurrency), taking into account all the lessons we learned from coding and from the community tests. This will be a long and detailed discussion and should result in a complete architecture of the final product.It’s also worth mentioning that RFC #34 (Refactor ImmutableData::name() Function4) was implemented in Routing last week.
Client: Krishna (tl), Scott & Shankar
Last week we tested the Launcher patch version while we simultaneously started working on the new Launcher UI. By the middle of last week we got the Launcher to a stable state after internal testing. We were able to run the Launcher application for a longer duration without restart.Now we are integrating the new UI and we are close to getting the tasks wrapped up. We hope to start testing the new Launcher tomorrow and once the new Launcher version is stable we hope to roll out the latest version by this week.P.S. There is one week left to submit proposals for the SAFE Browser RFP
